


How to win at Taboo without really trying

by Zabbers



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 04:36:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2679380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you know each other as well as Malcolm and Jamie do, you understand each other even when some words are forbidden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to win at Taboo without really trying

The worst has happened. Influenced by reports of Stewart Pearson’s forced-bonding team-management death camps, the Opposition has gathered for a weekend retreat (not a word in Malcolm’s vocabulary) in what might generously be described as the under-ball skin folds of Essex. 

The trust exercise—the less said about the trust exercise the better. They’re playing a game now, some sort of bastardised hellspawn of charades and an unprepped politician’s anxiety nightmare, Malcolm staring blankly as his Leader demonstrates her command of a fumbling, backtracking jumble of word porridge. He wants to tell her to stop making those apologetic grimaces, she looks like she’s embarrassed she’s just driven over someone’s dog, but the banal vapidity of the game has apparently paralysed him from the head up. 

When he sees the undersized figure smirking in the doorway, he thinks he’s actually begun to hallucinate out of sheer boredom and the pressing need to escape the desperate glances Nicola keeps shooting him. But then the wee fucker saunters oh-so-casually through the frame, and the building fails to fall down without Jamie propping it up, and he comes right up behind this woman he’s never met and peers over her shoulder at the card she’s holding and plucks it out of her hand.

"Come on now, love, this isnae so hard," he says, and Malcolm thinks he might have a heart attack right there in the middle of this carpet-glue scented corporate approximation of a room.

They sweep the game, of course. None of the wankers left in the Opposition can even understand what is essentially Malcolm and Jamie’s private language, a language of shared origins but also of shared history. Of years’ watching and unintended study and automatic looks that in an instant and without any words at all say things like  _remember that night in ‘93, with the minicab and the gypit canvasser who wouldn’t shut up? Yeah, the thing that fell out of her handbag when we finally got rid of her._  Never mind that none of them have bothered to know each other well enough to guess that sister means Wales when Glenn can’t say fluke or ocean or Moby Dick, or that Baldy Christmas stands for Julius Nicholson’s holiday hamper which is another word for stop.

Don’t stop, don’t ever stop again. These are words he couldn’t say, not before and he’s not sure, maybe not even now. Jamie’s grinning over at Malcolm as he gathers into a big pile all the cards they’ve won like it’s a pirate horde, a stack of high-value poker chips, the notarised affidavits of every CEO who has ever slapped his pisser and a hot bribe into the hand of a Tory official. It’s like the last six years were a bad dream Malcolm’s had after an all-night reshuffle fever, and Jamie never went away. 

Maybe he knew the words that Malcolm forbade himself, maybe he always did. Maybe he made it so Malcolm never had to say them.  _Why did I let you stop?_ Malcolm thinks, unwilling to take his eyes off his mad word-stealing pirate king, afraid if he does he’ll sail away again, or that he’ll find Jamie was never here at all, this fucking broken-off lost piece of his own brain. If he was ever here at all.


End file.
